Google's Search Dominance Erodes Amidst Rising Competition and Market Shifts

A new report by Statcounter is shedding light on Google’s share of the worldwide search engine market which fell below 90%. This was a record as it never occurred in the past decade.

The last time something as significant as this was seen was in 2015. The data shows how the search market share produced consistent values of under 90% during the last three months of 2024.

The figures outlined in the report showed how they fell to 89.34% in October and then similar findings were seen in November and December of 2024. It’s a clear trend that the Android maker is seeing market share loss consistently.

The question on many people’s minds had to do with where the drop arose. As per the stats, the market share was very consistent in most parts of the world except for Asia. This could be a possible explanation for the overall drop seen by the tech giant.

Google’s American search market share rose to 90.37% in November but fell to 87.39% in the month after. In most other months of 2024, the search market share was mostly the same, varying a little between 86 to 88%.

When you look at the bigger picture, Google was under attack for nearly two whole years over how unhelpful the search results were becoming despite it attaining dominating figures. This might have a lot to do with the firm’s unlawful monopoly status. It had a commanding consistency of 90 to 92% for nearly 10 years.

Are we finally beginning to witness people moving far away from search engines? Now that only time can tell experts are on alert to see how stats vary in the next few months. But where did searchers disappear?

Statcounter shared how Bing, Yahoo, and even Yandex got the benefit linked to Google’s loss in search market share. Runner-up Microsoft Bing stood under 4% for the last five months in 2024. You might see this as a celebration for some in the world of search marketing domain and even those linked to SEO. These are both the areas where Google lost a huge search market share. But the loss was not huge which is why Statcounter was left with no choice but to revise the information it published.

With all of that having been said, it is important to note that Statcounter has faced data reporting issues in the past, so these statistics could potentially be affected by such bugs. Further more third-party and first-party analysis will be needed to confirm the trends.

Read next: What’s OpenAI’s Economic Blueprint? A Bold Call to Reshape AI, Policy, and Global Innovation
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Instagram Outlines Its Top Priorities in 2025 For Better Growth and Improvement of the App

Meta has been facing an array of criticism for altering its policies for fact-checking and acceptable speech. Now, the head of Instagram is laying down the app’s key areas for focus in 2025.

Adam Mosseri shared in a new message which areas Instagram will focus on to achieve more growth and success for the app. This includes a greater focus on political content that aligns with Meta’s announcement.

The question remains where such content is going to fit as more than half of the material published through the platform’s feeds are Reels generated through AI. As per Mosseri, the greatest areas of emphasis for Instagram will be achieving connectivity and creativity.

As far as creativity is concerned, Mosseri shared how he would like to make sure the app’s creative tools are the best in the business and also hopes to take on new tech including AI that offers greater opportunities for creators.

Mosseri delineated more on that front including how Instagram was built on the idea to share creative content with others. This is why the app is trying to focus on achieving just that and also ensuring creative tools are the best in the business. They hope to take on more talent and tech to assist the app attain this. Also, Mosseri shed light on how Instagram would try to reward creative content by ensuring rankings are more linked to creativity and original material than anything else.

This has been a major focus for the platform right now as well with creators attaining monetization for their efforts. Now, systems will be more in tune with the goal than before with more emphasis on original content and less on repetition.

Last year in April, the app shared how the algorithm was refocused to display smaller creators and demote recommendations linked to aggregator profiles. This will remain the focus for 2025 with changes to the algorithm. The goal seems to be adding ease for new creators trying to make it big on the app.

This might also mean that established profiles might be losing out but still, original content remains supreme.

On the other hand, Mosseri shared more about what great connection means. They hope to double down on features like messaging which happens to be the main means to communicate on the platform, he added.

Instagram will also look to search for new ideas to offer recommendations and consume material that’s fun, social, and gives chances for interactions. They hope to explore new opportunities to connect with followers on the app.

As you can see, there are still not a lot of details provided on how exactly all the measures would be taken to attain the goals. But we can expect to see more features like Notes arrive. This will assist users on the platform to connect in ways that are more aligned with sharing material and texting in private.

Image: DIW-AIgen

Read next: Which AI Models Are Leading the Way in Reducing Hallucinations and Improving Accuracy?
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Which AI Models Are Leading the Way in Reducing Hallucinations and Improving Accuracy?

AI models are helping us in a lot of areas but they tend to hallucinate too and give us inaccurate information. IBM defines hallucinations in AI chatbots or computer vision tools as some outputs that come out as inaccurate due to detection of some patterns that do not exist. Vectara analyzed 1,000 short documents with each LLMs to detect hallucinations in them and came up with top 15 large language models with the lowest rates of hallucination. According to the data, Zhipu AI’s GLM-4-9B-Chat has the least hallucination rate at 1.3%. Google Gemini-2.0-Flash-Esp has the second lowest hallucination rate at 1.3% as well.

The top third LLM with least hallucination levels is OpenAI’s o1-mini with 1.4% hallucination rate. With a hallucination rate of 1.5%, GPT-4o is the fourth model with least hallucination. GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4-Turbo have hallucination rates of 1.7%. It was observed that more specialized and smaller models have the lowest hallucination rates. OpenAI’s GPT-4 has a hallucination rate of 1.8%, while GPT-3.5-Turbo has a hallucination rate of 1.9%.

It is important for AI systems to show low levels of hallucination for them to work properly, especially in high-stake applications in healthcare, finance and law. Smaller models are slowly reducing hallucinations in their AI models, with Mistral 8×7B models reducing hallucinations in their AI generated texts.

Model	Hallucination Rate	Factual Consistency Rate	Answer Rate	Average Summary Length (Words)
Zhipu AI GLM-4-9B-Chat	1.3 %	98.7 %	100.0 %	58.1
Google Gemini-2.0-Flash-Exp	1.3 %	98.7 %	99.9 %	60
OpenAI-o1-mini	1.4 %	98.6 %	100.0 %	78.3
GPT-4o	1.5 %	98.5 %	100.0 %	77.8
GPT-4o-mini	1.7 %	98.3 %	100.0 %	76.3
GPT-4-Turbo	1.7 %	98.3 %	100.0 %	86.2
GPT-4	1.8 %	98.2 %	100.0 %	81.1
GPT-3.5-Turbo	1.9 %	98.1 %	99.6 %	84.1
DeepSeek-V2.5	2.4 %	97.6 %	100.0 %	83.2
Microsoft Orca-2-13b	2.5 %	97.5 %	100.0 %	66.2
Microsoft Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct	2.5 %	97.5 %	96.3 %	69.7
Intel Neural-Chat-7B-v3-3	2.6 %	97.4 %	100.0 %	60.7
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct	2.8 %	97.2 %	100.0 %	71
AI21 Jamba-1.5-Mini	2.9 %	97.1 %	95.6 %	74.5
Snowflake-Arctic-Instruct	3.0 %	97.0 %	100.0 %	68.7
Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct	3.0 %	97.0 %	100.0 %	67.9
Microsoft Phi-3-mini-128k-instruct	3.1 %	96.9 %	100.0 %	60.1
OpenAI-o1-preview	3.3 %	96.7 %	100.0 %	119.3
Google Gemini-1.5-Flash-002	3.4 %	96.6 %	99.9 %	59.4
01-AI Yi-1.5-34B-Chat	3.7 %	96.3 %	100.0 %	83.7
Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct	3.9 %	96.1 %	99.6 %	85.7
Microsoft Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct	4.0 %	96.0 %	100.0 %	86.8
Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct	4.0 %	96.0 %	100.0 %	85.3
Microsoft Phi-3.5-mini-instruct	4.1 %	95.9 %	100.0 %	75
Mistral-Large2	4.1 %	95.9 %	100.0 %	77.4
Llama-3-70B-Chat-hf	4.1 %	95.9 %	99.2 %	68.5
Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct	4.2 %	95.8 %	100.0 %	73.9
Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct	4.2 %	95.8 %	100.0 %	74.8
Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct	4.3 %	95.7 %	100.0 %	80
Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Instruct	4.3 %	95.7 %	100.0 %	79.8
XAI Grok	4.6 %	95.4 %	100.0 %	91
Anthropic Claude-3-5-sonnet	4.6 %	95.4 %	100.0 %	95.9
Qwen2-72B-Instruct	4.7 %	95.3 %	100.0 %	100.1
Mixtral-8x22B-Instruct-v0.1	4.7 %	95.3 %	99.9 %	92
Anthropic Claude-3-5-haiku	4.9 %	95.1 %	100.0 %	92.9
01-AI Yi-1.5-9B-Chat	4.9 %	95.1 %	100.0 %	85.7
Cohere Command-R	4.9 %	95.1 %	100.0 %	68.7
Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct	5.0 %	95.0 %	100.0 %	79.6
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct	5.4 %	94.6 %	100.0 %	71
Cohere Command-R-Plus	5.4 %	94.6 %	100.0 %	68.4
Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct	5.5 %	94.5 %	100.0 %	67.3
Llama-2-70B-Chat-hf	5.9 %	94.1 %	99.9 %	84.9
IBM Granite-3.0-8B-Instruct	6.5 %	93.5 %	100.0 %	74.2
Google Gemini-1.5-Pro-002	6.6 %	93.7 %	99.9 %	62
Google Gemini-1.5-Flash	6.6 %	93.4 %	99.9 %	63.3
Microsoft phi-2	6.7 %	93.3 %	91.5 %	80.8
Google Gemma-2-2B-it	7.0 %	93.0 %	100.0 %	62.2
Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct	7.0 %	93.0 %	100.0 %	70.4
Llama-3-8B-Chat-hf	7.4 %	92.6 %	99.8 %	79.7
Google Gemini-Pro	7.7 %	92.3 %	98.4 %	89.5
01-AI Yi-1.5-6B-Chat	7.9 %	92.1 %	100.0 %	98.9
Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct	7.9 %	92.1 %	100.0 %	72.2
databricks dbrx-instruct	8.3 %	91.7 %	100.0 %	85.9
Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct	8.3 %	91.7 %	100.0 %	81.8
Cohere Aya Expanse 32B	8.5 %	91.5 %	99.9 %	81.9
IBM Granite-3.0-2B-Instruct	8.8 %	91.2 %	100.0 %	81.6
Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3	9.5 %	90.5 %	100.0 %	98.4
Google Gemini-1.5-Pro	9.1 %	90.9 %	99.8 %	61.6
Anthropic Claude-3-opus	10.1 %	89.9 %	95.5 %	92.1
Google Gemma-2-9B-it	10.1 %	89.9 %	100.0 %	70.2
Llama-2-13B-Chat-hf	10.5 %	89.5 %	99.8 %	82.1
AllenAI-OLMo-2-13B-Instruct	10.8 %	89.2 %	100.0 %	82
AllenAI-OLMo-2-7B-Instruct	11.1 %	88.9 %	100.0 %	112.6
Mistral-Nemo-Instruct	11.2 %	88.8 %	100.0 %	69.9
Llama-2-7B-Chat-hf	11.3 %	88.7 %	99.6 %	119.9
Microsoft WizardLM-2-8x22B	11.7 %	88.3 %	99.9 %	140.8
Cohere Aya Expanse 8B	12.2 %	87.8 %	99.9 %	83.9
Amazon Titan-Express	13.5 %	86.5 %	99.5 %	98.4
Google PaLM-2	14.1 %	85.9 %	99.8 %	86.6
Google Gemma-7B-it	14.8 %	85.2 %	100.0 %	113
Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct	15.8 %	84.2 %	100.0 %	70.7
Qwen-QwQ-32B-Preview	16.1 %	83.9 %	100.0 %	201.5
Anthropic Claude-3-sonnet	16.3 %	83.7 %	100.0 %	108.5
Google Gemma-1.1-7B-it	17.0 %	83.0 %	100.0 %	64.3
Anthropic Claude-2	17.4 %	82.6 %	99.3 %	87.5
Google Flan-T5-large	18.3 %	81.7 %	99.3 %	20.9
Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1	20.1 %	79.9 %	99.9 %	90.7
Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct	20.7 %	79.3 %	100.0 %	71.5
Apple OpenELM-3B-Instruct	24.8 %	75.2 %	99.3 %	47.2
Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct	25.2 %	74.8 %	100.0 %	72.6
Google Gemma-1.1-2B-it	27.8 %	72.2 %	100.0 %	66.8
TII falcon-7B-instruct	29.9 %	70.1 %	90.0 %	75.5

Read next:

• WhatsApp Beta Tests Personalized AI Chatbots – A Sneak Peek at What’s Coming!

• Researchers Explore How Personality and Integrity Shape Trust in AI Technology

• China’s AI Chatbot Market Sees ByteDance’s Doubao Leading Through Innovation and Accessibility
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

WhatsApp Beta Tests Personalized AI Chatbots – A Sneak Peek at What’s Coming!

WhatsApp Beta for Android update is here and as per WBI there is a new feature that is going to create personalized AI chatbots. In the previous update of WhatsApp Beta for Android, a new feature was spotted by WBI, in which Whatsapp tested a dedicated tab for AI powered chats. Due to that feature, users will be able to use AI tools and features conveniently. Now WhatsApp is working on developing AI chats with personalized AI characters. Soon users will be able to create AI chatbots, and can make them unique with specific expertise.

There was a feature available on Instagram of personalizing your AI, but now WhatsApp is bringing it to its own platform with more functionality. This means that users will be able to create their customized AI, meaning, users can bring their own AI ideas to life by creating their tailored AI which will have specific qualities. But our guess is that, it would not be much different from OpenAI's customized instructions.

On Whatsapp AI Chatbot users will have to add a description to their AI character, mentioning what it does and how it is different from other AIs. The AI character can be made of any type, from entertainment and productivity, to a friend or personal assistant. There will also be some options and suggestions for users to choose from if they don't know what type of AI character they want to create.

The descriptions of AI characters that users will provide will be used in shaping the character’s personality. WhatsApp will also ask users to tell what is the main objective and role of their AI character. All of these questions will help WhatsApp create an AI chatbot similar to what users have imagined. Right now, this feature is under development and WhatsApp hasn't made any official announcement about it. So we don't know when this feature will be available to the public.

It is important to note that WhatsApp’s upcoming personalized AI chatbot feature may face delays or never be released, considering Meta’s recent decision to remove its AI personalities from Facebook and Instagram due to backlash.

On the other hand, Meta's privacy practices, especially its use of user data for AI model training, have long raised concerns. The company has faced criticism for its handling of personal information, with many users wary of how their data is utilized for AI development. While caution is advised, careful usage of the new WhatsApp feature is recommended, keeping in mind the potential privacy implications of sharing personal data with AI.

Read next: Social Media’s Youngest Fans: The Platforms Kids Can’t Stay Away From
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Researchers Explore How Personality and Integrity Shape Trust in AI Technology

AI has become an important part of our lives and we cannot escape it no matter how hard we try. But the question arises if people trust it enough and if they do, what influences them to make this decision? Researchers from University of Basel conducted a study to find out to what extent do people trust AI chatbots and what factors does it depend upon. For the study, the researchers made up a text based AI platform called Conversea, and analyzed the interactions between the chatbot and the users.

There are a lot of factors that make us trust something. It can be our own personality, how others behave with us, others’ personality and also some specific situation that calls for us to trust someone. The ability of people to trust someone develops from childhood and helps us decide how open we want to be with someone. The researchers say that the factors which play a role in trusting someone also play the same role in our trust in AI systems.

The characteristics most important for trust are integrity and competence and these two help humans evaluate if an AI is reliable or not. The study also found that participants do not think of AI in the light of the company which created it, they think of it as a whole separate unit. Impersonal and personalized chatbots also play a role in our perception of trust in them. If a chatbot is referring to us by our name and also mentions previous conversations, the participants say that the AI chatbot is competent and kind.

When an AI chatbot is personalized, the users think of it as a human and that's why they tend to share more personal information with it and want to use it more. But the study found that there was no difference in trust in personalized and impersonal chatbots by the participants. The study says that for trust to develop, integrity is the most important factor so developing integrity in AI chatbots should be prioritized. Most of the lonely people have started relying on AI because they seem personalized to them.

The researchers of the study said that they think that AI systems should be reliable above anything else. The researchers haven't said anything about whether trusting AI is good or bad, but they think that too much usage of AI as a friend can isolate us from our social environments. AI chatbots should always give advice to users along with the consequences and risks of it. They should also stop inventing answers and just tell the users that they don't have an answer for their question to give them some reality check.

Image: DIW-Aigen

Read next: China’s AI Chatbot Market Sees ByteDance’s Doubao Leading Through Innovation and Accessibility
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

China’s AI Chatbot Market Sees ByteDance’s Doubao Leading Through Innovation and Accessibility

Doubao is an AI chatbot created by ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin/TikTok. It was released in August 2024 in China and soon became one of the most prominent AI chatbots in the country. It doesn't have a clear profit model, but it still became successful and is now being used by millions of users in China. As of November 2024, Doubao has 60 million monthly active users and this shows that other competitors have no chance. Baidu’s Wen Xiaoyan has 13 million monthly active users while Moonshot AI’s Kimi has 12.8 monthly active users. Doubao is being well liked by users because of its high functionality and user experience.

Just like ChatGPT, Doubao also offers users advanced image, video and text processing capabilities. It is a multimodal on which users can generate high quality texts, images and videos, and can even ask it to generate image interpretations and audio-based content. The platform is versatile and ByteDance promises users to bring more innovations to Doubao. It is also greatly helping users for their professional needs, like academic research, content creation and personal entertainment. It resonates well with users and it is providing them with helpful and deeper interactions.

ByteDance also has a powerful ecosystem which has contributed to Doubao’s success. Douyin, Chinese equivalent of TikTok, has a massive user base so the company has integrated Doubao into this digital landscape too. It also offers data-driven personalization which helps users build their own experiences, and helps them connect with Doubao directly.

• Also read: What Are AI Companies Hiding? New Report Exposes Transparency Gaps in Top Models

Doubao gives users highly relevant and contextualized responses, which makes it different from its competitors. ByteDance also has technological superiority and offers advanced functionality, which is helping Doubao in its rapid growth. Right now, Doubao is a leader in the AI chatbots landscape because of all the qualities mentioned above.

Chinese tech giants are also lowering their LLM prices to make them more accessible to users. The price of Doubao’s main model is 99.3% less than average industry prices for business users. As affordability is a big factor in China to access something, this pricing strategy is a good way to make the AI chatbot widespread so all types of users can use it.

Domestic Ranking	AI Product (Company)	November App MAU	November MAU Monthly Change
1	Doubao (Douyin/ByteDance)	59.98M	+16.92%
2	ERNIE Bot (Baidu)	12.99M	+3.33%
3	Kimi (Moonshot AI)	12.82M	+27.40%
4	ChatGLM (Zhipu AI)	6.37M	+22.18%
5	iFlyTek Spark (iFlyTek)	5.94M	+4.23%

Read next: Social Media’s Youngest Fans: The Platforms Kids Can’t Stay Away From
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Social Media’s Youngest Fans: The Platforms Kids Can’t Stay Away From

TikTok is the most used social media platform among users of all ages, and a new study published in Academic Pediatrics also found that it is the most popular platform among underage users too. There are many age restrictions for children under the age of 13 on platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, but children are still using them. The study says that many 11-15 years old in America have at least one social media account, while 6.3% of young children also have secret accounts their parents do not know about. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was made to protect children from harmful content on social media but a lot of children somehow bypass age restrictions on the apps and get exposed to problematic content. It also affects their mental as well as physical health.

The study used data from Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study which researched about 11,000 children in the US to know about their cognitive development. All the participants in the study were from diverse ethnic groups, demographics, socioeconomic, geographical and racial backgrounds. The researchers of this study analyzed a dataset of 10,092 participants between the ages of 11-15, between the years 2019 to 2021. Participants were given surveys about their social media usage, and there were questions about how much they use social media, what are their platform preferences and whether they have a secret account or not. Social Media Addiction Questionnaire was also added in the survey to measure the harmful effects of prolonged social media usage in children.

The results of the survey showed that 69.5% of the participants of the survey had at least one social media account, even though most of the platforms require users to be 13 years or older. 63.8% of children under 13 also admitted having at least one social media account and TikTok was the most popular network among them. 68.2% of social media users under 13 used TikTok, while 62.9% used YouTube. Instagram (57.3%) and Snapchat (55.2%) was also some most used platforms among children under 13 years.

Social Media Addiction Questionnaire*	Never	Very Rarely	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Very Often
I spend a lot of time thinking about social media apps or planning my use of social media apps.	31.0%	22.9%	20.7%	18.8%	4.7%	1.8%
I feel the need to use social media apps more and more.	43.2%	19.1%	22.8%	10.9%	3.0%	0.9%
I use social media apps so I can forget about my problems.	47.9%	14.2%	12.7%	16.7%	5.6%	2.9%
I've tried to use my social media apps less but I can’t.	52.9%	15.1%	14.9%	11.2%	4.0%	1.8%
I've become stressed or upset if I am not allowed to use my social media apps.	58.0%	15.0%	12.1%	10.0%	3.3%	1.5%
I use social media apps so much that it has had a bad effect on my schoolwork or job.	66.6%	13.3%	9.3%	7.6%	2.3%	0.9%

It is not surprising that a lot of underage children are using social media, because there are no solid age verification systems on these platforms. Children can easily enter an older date of birth and access social media app. The study also found that under 13 children also had an average 3.38 accounts on social networks. Adolescents were more inclined to have a secret account hidden from their parents than under 13 children. There was also a gender difference in social media usage among under-age children. Girls were more likely to use platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest while Boys were more likely to use Reddit and YouTube. Girls were also likely to become emotionally dependent on social media and spend significant time there. The researchers also noted that social media usage among under-age kids increased during Covid-19 as they became highly dependent on digital communication. The study sheds light on how social media usage among under-age children can have serious consequences if social media platforms do not take any measures to have strict age requirements.

Read next: Downloading Cracked Software? Beware of the Hidden Malware Stealing Your Info
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World